My Felted Accessories

Subscription to a Newsletter

Followers

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Since we moved to US Halloween has become one of our favorite holidays. It's so much fun to dress up, decorate our home and invite guests on Halloween. As usual we will make a few Halloween family projects to decorate our house.

I would like to share a simple project that could be accomplished either by one person or a whole family. This time we will make Halloween themed pumpkin coasters that will add color to our house and make it ready for the holidays. Children will no doubt have fun making funny pumpkins with scary faces.

We will need white and black felting wool, water, soap and bubbled wrap paper. If you have orange felting wool it's even better as in that case we won't have to dye it.

To start our project we have to lay down pieces of white (orange) wool on a large piece of bubbled wrap paper. Bubbles on the paper should face up. In order for our coasters to be round we should try to form a circle out of our pieces of wool. As a result of felting our wool will shrink by about 30%. Keep it in mind! We will have to make our circles about 30% larger than the original size we want them to be.
We can put as many layers of wool as we want. More layers are there thicker the coasters will be.

With pieces of black wool we form a small circle and place it on our white wool. It will be our pumpkin's eye. It's time to unleash your creativity! You can make your pumpkin look funny, happy or scary by making eyes of different shapes and sizes. The same is true for a mouth. We can make it happy or sad.

As soon as the pumpkin's face is ready we can carefully wet and soap it. Make sure the face expression doesn't alter or we will not be able to fix it later. Once the wool is wet we can start felting by rubbing the paper. In the process of felting individual wool fibers will adhere forming a firm piece. We continue felting adding water and soap as needed. The process is completed when individual wool fibers are stuck and we are unable to separate them. It's time to rinse our project and let it dry.

If you originally used white wool it's time to dye it in orange so that our pumpkin looks like a true Halloween creature!
To dye our coaster I used orange KoolAid. In a plastic tray suitable for use in a microwave I mixed water and orange KoolAid. I put my white coaster in the orange solution and kept it in the microwave until it boiled. Be careful handling the tray as it's very hot! Your coaster now is nice and orange. Let it cool and when it's cool rinse it and let it dry. Your orange pumpkin coaster is ready!

Pinterest

Hi there!

I'm glad you stopped by! As an artist I'm happy to share my creative ideas with you. Feel free to comment and discuss as I very much value and appreciate your attention, opinion and your thoughts!
Tonya